OWN GOAL: Safa president Danny Jordaan has made what he calls a “payment” for the development of football. He is currently charged with fraud from 2014 to 2018. Photo: Alex Grimm/Getty Images
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Ahead of the World Cup, I was named The Sunday Times' 2010 Correspondent. It wasn't as prestigious as one of those jobs that no one wanted to do because their plates were already full with other jobs. I occasionally met Danny Jordaan (the man primarily responsible for bringing the event to our shores) over breakfast in Sandton.
I remember we agreed to meet at Eastgate, a shopping mall on the east side of Johannesburg.
Miraculously, Jordaan, who was driving a huge BMW, managed to get lost. He seemed so stressed and groggy that I sometimes wondered how he was able to get up in the morning or if he needed someone to wake him up.
Despite our golf cart escapades in the Caribbean and late night phone calls, we fell in love with each other. He was a left-arm medium pace bowler, he once told me, and somehow that fit. He asked me to write a book, either a ghostwritten autobiography or a biography.
He sometimes looked overworked and pale, but that went well with his perpetually disheveled appearance. Remember, there was a time when FIFA, concerned about South Africa's perceived underdevelopment, parachuted a large portion of the Swiss A team into South Africa.
I remember the name Delia Fisher. If I needed anything, I went to Delia. She was very time sensitive and checked all the chronological boxes.
The World Cup was truly enjoyable, from Siphiwe Tshabalala's equalizing goal in the opening match against Mexico to Diego Maradona's press conference, from Spain's tiki-taka to Ghana's better-than-expected run and handball. But eventually the sound of the vuvuzela stopped and the fun was over. The dream began to fade. To make matters worse, the dreams began to worsen.
Bafana's pre-World Cup friendlies against Thailand, Colombia, Guatemala and Bulgaria were found to have been match-fixed by a group of mostly Singaporean match-fixers pretending to be Simon Mega Diamond and Jason Joe Lourdes. .
They have infiltrated the refereeing department of the South African Football Association (Safa), but there are people who think there is something wrong when fixers (men they have never seen) offer to procure unvetted referees. There were hardly any. And at a lower rate than usual.
The city of Safa, which Jordaan took over after his World Cup golf cart and mayoral duties, became Byzantine and inefficient. The executive was a big shot. CEOs came and went. There was a culture here that seemed more obsessed with factionalism and patronage than delivery.
In 2011, Jordaan's compatriots Chuck Blazer and Jack Warner had an argument in Grenada, but they stopped scratching each other's backs. Warner was exposed by the Blazers for voter fraud and resigned from the FIFA executive before he could secure a pension.
One of his most sophisticated scams was building an outstanding soccer center on the outskirts of Port of Spain. He renamed the facility the Joan Havelanger Center of Excellence (COE) without the knowledge of the North, Central American and Caribbean Football Confederation (Concacaf). Havelange is a Brazilian bruiser and former FIFA president who was accused of going on a shooting spree in the Brazilian media. To Bolivia.
He used a front company “Renraw” (Warner spelled backwards) owned by himself, his wife and son to purchase the land for the Joan Havelanger Center of Excellence from Lever Brothers West Indies.
They leased the land back to Concacaf, who considered themselves to own both the center and the land on which it was built.
Barbados' former attorney general, Sir Anthony Cathcart-Symonds, wrote an integrity report into the history of Warner and Blazer, which was published in April 2013. Warner then took ownership of the COE property, which rightfully belonged to Concacaf. ”
Warner didn't achieve the goals he achieved by holed up on his front lawn doing tai chi and playing with his grandchildren. He returned the favor after the Blazers shopped him. And the FBI is after Blazer. A man who once rented an apartment in Manhattan's Trump Towers just for his cat was removed from his scooter and told to put his diary on hold.
Blazer was arrested on charges of tax evasion and money laundering. It turns out he liked paying himself commissions. His world, and Warner's world, was not checks and balances, as I remember writing at the time, but checks and balances.
Jordaan was more than dimly aware that all this was happening somewhere in the middle distance. He was also certainly aware of the fraud in the so-called African diaspora scheme. I don't need to worry about the details here, but suffice it to say that Warner was involved again.
In 2015, for example, the Financial Times tracked funding for African Diaspora programs. The report alleges that around the same time that FIFA was paying Warner for the Diaspora Legacy Program, $72 million flowed into the HSBC account of a Tunisian businessman and international soccer power broker in Switzerland. I concluded that. This amount is roughly equivalent to the $70 million that South Africans admitted to spending on “assistance”.[ing] Confederation of African Football.”
This is the same as admitting to paying bribes in exchange for votes. And while Jordaan peered into his briefcase and tried to remember what he thought he was looking for, it wasn't happening.
There is a widespread feeling that something more could have been gained from the World Cup. South Africa's successful hosting in 2010 generated so much energy and goodwill that the following years seemed like a missed opportunity. Jordan is certainly part of this missed opportunity. With the goal at his disposal, he shot it over the bar, just like in rugby.
In the mid-1990s, he told me and many others that football in this country wanted a place in the sun. Who would object given the legacy of apartheid? But what have we done with the place?
Are the fields red with flowers? Do we produce just a fraction of the world's best players, the world's best managers, the world's best referees? We all know the answers to these questions. Last week, Bafana Bafana defeated South Sudan in an African Cup of Nations qualifier. Some quarters hailed it as a victory worth celebrating.
Safa's story seems like a long pantomime. When it comes to money, there's always a lot of fuss about where it is, where it's not, and where it's gone. Safa's auditor, PwC, did not resign just once, but twice, in 2019 and 2020. We've all read about the President's Discretionary Fund. This is a word that no one likes except the president.
And what about Jennifer Ferguson's rape allegations against Jordaan? Why would a musician like Ferguson, who now lives far away in Sweden with his children, make up rape allegations if he doesn't feel he has to? What do you get?
The slightly jaundiced among us cannot help but notice that the current theft and fraud charges against Jordaan of R1.3 million are insignificant. This suggests that there were people who wanted Jordaan out, and once they came to this conclusion, they needed to find charges against him to support their desire to get rid of him.
But Jordan has nothing else. His purpose in life is to cut and thrust. And here's a cheeky thought: Given the company he keeps, or more precisely, the company he once kept between the international game's power brokers, the comedy duo Warner and Blazer. , is it really that surprising that he would be accused of private security on Safa's account? These are glimpses into the dysfunctional, hidden world of which Jordan is only a part.
I can't help but notice that Jordaan has a nasty habit of hogging the ball and sticking to it like an old-school playmaker. Every time someone yelled at him to get off, he gestured back that he couldn't hear them. He has lived there for almost 30 years.
He belongs to a famous company. Havelanger, a friend of Warner's, served as FIFA president for 24 years. Havelanger's successor, Sepp Blatter, served as chairman for 17 years.
It shows that men of their kind tend to favor their position through amiability, patronage, the breezy art of pats on the back and the dark art of secret handshakes. I mean, they stick around.
When we need to go above ground, we will. After a few months, they can be up and running again and continue at least until the next drama. These are players who played all of the 1990s. They always are.
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